“It’s negative. Negative impact. Object remains inbound.”

These three sentences—spoken by a U.S. Army officer in Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite—are said quietly and with clipped military efficiency, but they are laden with dread; they mean that millions of people are minutes away from being incinerated or buried beneath the rubble of an American city.

Americans, along with billions of other people on this planet, once had a healthy fear of nuclear war. They knew, even if they did not dwell on it, that they could wake up and make a cup of coffee, and then, before they had a chance to finish breakfast, they and the civilization they took for granted every day could be extinguished. That fear seems mostly gone now, and Americans have long needed a movie set in the 21st cent

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